Category Archives: Word Prisms

Heartfelt, Urgent Advice for Colleagues Stuck in the Downward Pricing Vortex of the Bulk Market

Imagine for a moment that you were in the business of manufacturing digital cameras. In fact, let’s take it a step further and say you invented digital photography. These cameras were a bit pricey at first, and the initial images were terrible, but their innovation was that they eliminated film and film processing; the pictures were immediately visible, could be stored, shared and posted almost anywhere, and the picture quality eventually became startlingly good.

Then along came the smartphone. They were unusually expensive five years ago, but the white-hot smartphone market is synonymous with brutal competition between innovative companies like Apple and Samsung, and pricing, features, longevity and physical resiliency have grown dramatically.

So today such innovation has resulted in a smartphone market where progress is rapid and picture resolution, pixel storage capacity and sharing capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds. Smartphone cameras today are more compact than digital cameras, are easier to use, faster in transporting and storing images, and sit in nearly everybody’s pocket.

So Why Would Anybody Buy a Digital Camera Today?

The answer is: Very, very few people do. Forbes called the collapse of the digital camera market one of the fastest and most startling devastations of a modern commercial market. The smartphone market has been on a tear not just to take market share, but to destroy the entire digital camera market, a process that began in 2010, eventually resulting in the bankruptcy of the company that invented digital photography: Kodak.

Steve Sasson, the Kodak engineer who invented digital photography in 1975, was told by Kodak executives to “keep it quiet,” because it endangered the sale of film, their principal revenue driver.

The “keep it quiet” strategy is a terrible defense against destructive innovation. The pile of rubble and aged patents that constitute what is left of Kodak are a strong testimony to that reality.

Google Translate as Destructive Innovation

The analogy to the translation market is clear. Google Translate (GT), which has been on an inexorable climb toward better quality over the last fifteen years, contains billions of words in paired language strings in its enormous corpora, which of course are human-produced translations courtesy of our colleagues in such international organizations as the U.N., the E.U, the European Patent Office, and the Canadian Government, as well as multiple other organizations.

These are good, human-produced translations, and don’t even require statistical machine translation.

It’s beyond ironic that calls for translators to collaborate to produce higher quality – calls that are usually ignored – is what GT is actually doing. It is leveraging the work of all your colleagues on a massive global scale, and giving it away for free, as a bundled product.

GT has become the modern translation equivalent of the smartphone. Translators in the bulk market are still trying to sell digital cameras, and are frantically watching prices continue to drop where “good enough quality” is sold. This is the same market where customers recognize that GT is often wrong, but it’s instant, free and “good enough quality.” Now is GT perfect? Of course not. But neither is a smartphone. The lighting is often off, or people feel that they are not flattered, so they take several pictures and pick the one they like best. Snapchat and other platforms provide filters to make people look good, or thinner, or to adjust the color of their face or even to turn them into various cute creatures. All for free.

Shift in Expectations

People accept these imperfections in smartphones vs. what an exceptionally good high-end digital camera can produce – much as they accept translation imperfections with a shrug – because there has been a major shift in expectations.

Instant, free, convenient and “good enough” have changed what people expect. Which is why GT famously translates millions of more words every day than all human translators do in a year. Here’s an intriguing question. As a translator with a smartphone, would you spend several hundred dollars to buy a digital camera to take the same pictures you do today with your smartphone?

I think we can safely say that the answer to that question is “no.”

Yet that is what translators in the bulk “good enough to understand” market are asking their clients to do every day. Pay them to translate texts that GT may actually produce better (remember that GT is often simply leveraging the existing translations of your very skilled colleagues).

Clients Awake to the New Reality

And now we are witnessing clients in the bulk market – agencies, small businesses, even major corporations – waking up to this reality. Clients who “just need to know what the document says” are beginning to push back even on the idea that a human needs to take the lead. They often question what a translator produces if they’ve seen a different translation on GT. They demand low, single-digit rates that almost require the use of GT, which turns translators into unwilling post-editors.

These clients’ view is reflected in a famous quote by the photographer Ken Rockwell: “The best camera you can use is the one you have on you.” Increasingly in the translation world, that is GT – and translators who have not honed their skills to move upmarket are feeling the undertow. And it’s getting worse, with rates continuing to edge downward, and translators feeling like commodities, where every human translator is considered indistinguishable from every other.

Markets Where Smartphones Fall Short

To continue our analogy to smartphones, let’s recognize that there will always be markets where smartphones are simply not going to work as cameras. These are domains where quality really does matter and where the added expertise of the photographer is critical and well-compensated. For example:

Professional photo shoots of a wide range of products, from cars to food, for high-end professional use by companies;

Head-shots for professional portfolios;

Photojournalism where the impact of an image requires exceptional talent to capture;

Wedding and special-event photography;

Live-event coverage for media, sports, and entertainment for commercial purposes;

Studio settings for lighting, high-end equipment and the skills to use them.

Man between two round balancing boulders

In translation, those same markets also exist, but they lie several miles above the “good enough to understand” bulk market. These markets are referred to as the ”value-added market” and the “premium market” (distinction discussed below) and typical products include:

Annual reports and formal financial disclosure statements required by law that are issued by multinational corporations, where translators must master regulatory issues and complex financial rules;

Professionally published journals, articles and documentation in the sciences and engineering, requiring advanced technical training on the part of the translators;

Diplomatic and intelligence data in a wide array of fields critical to national security, both classified and unclassified, where translation often blends into analysis, requiring special expertise;

Translations adapted across cultures in ways where the two products end up as completely different works of art.

In the same way that an exceptionally talented photographer can “make magic come alive” in the photographs taken in the examples above, an exceptionally talented translator can also “make the message come alive” in the translation examples.

Note I did not say make “text” or “words” come alive. Those are often translators’ worst enemies, as they are trapped into translating words rather than ideas – what those words express. As I’ve long argued: “Translation is not about words. It’s about what the words are about.”

The photographer Ken Rockwell also famously noted: “The camera’s only job is getting out of the way of making photographs.” This suggests what we have known all along – it’s the talent, expertise, experience and collaborative flair of both the photographer and the translator that makes it possible for these artists to create art: To be able to work in both the value-added market and at the very pinnacle of the industry: the premium market.

Soon these will be the only sectors of the industry that even exist for professional photographers or translators.

Moving Upmarket: Two Pathways out of the Bulk Market

Bulk Market. The market where GT poses a singular threat and is already having an immensely harmful impact on rates is in what we call the “bulk market” – the estimated 60% of commercial translation done “for informational purposes,” or to “convey basic information” where “good enough” is the standard and price is the primary basis of selection, because GT (free) is considered a serious option.

Uneducated clients are also increasingly using GT for “outbound” translations: Into the languages of their clients, for purposes of selling their products to their own customers in broad, general consumer markets, or for software and web content localization, in languages the uneducated clients don’t understand. The pitfalls of such an approach are obvious, as the client cannot judge the results, but the brand power of Google and the mindshare grip that GT has on their view of translation has shoved the “for information” translators out of the picture.

Translation Fail: United Airlines

For example, United Airlines recently used GT and a tiny bit of post editing to translate their apology letter relating to the passenger violently dragged off a flight, resulting in a translation that, while understandable, was very far from polished or persuasive in the target languages. Count this as yet another PR blunder by United Airlines in their attempt to enhance their image. One would think such a sensitive and delicate communication would intuitively compel management to demand the best, but we are seeing the immense Google branding power behave like water on a flat surface – it finds the cracks and flows into them all.

The Value-Added Market

The “value-added market” is a higher-end sector that requires special expertise, experience and sensitivity. While not yet the premium market, it’s a solid step above the bulk market, and often where translators work for years as they hone their talents and expertise before moving into the premium market.

The value-added market is where the translations are typically in a specialized subject-area that is sensitive enough for clients to pause at the thought of using GT or any machine translation at all. The complexity of the subject is enough to sow doubt in clients’ minds. The risk of a translation error can be significant. Translators who work in these markets (typical rates in the USD $0.15 – $0.20 range) have completed specialty training in the subject-matter at the university level, are exceptional writers, and have largely completed the switch to direct clients and the best boutique agencies while terminating their relationships with low-end bulk-market agencies and ceased to consider random agency inquiries.

IT and telecom, with principal focus on innovation and next-generation technology solutions;

Accounting and auditing on the corporate, institutional and legal levels;

Environmental sciences, petroleum and industrial engineering;

Entertainment: subtitling, voice-over and A/V at the national network and media level.

While this is obviously a representative list, it is hardly exhaustive, and in several sectors overlaps with the list provided above to contrast with the bulk market. But this value-added market is not the province of generalists or bulk-market translators – those who market themselves in these areas without the true expertise to succeed will certainly fail. A ticket to success in this market is hard-won, and success takes talent, commitment, a thorough knowledge of the subject matter and an excellent record of performance.

The Premium Market

The ironclad way around becoming an unwilling post-editor or being stuck at low single-digit rates is to become an expert translator. A specialist. A true artist. This requires exceptional subject-area knowledge, exquisite writing skills, and a lifetime of collaboration with your most talented colleagues.

Here are some tough-love truths about the bulk vs. the premium market. This will help translators dodge the bulk-market trap of perpetual downward pricing competition.

One can tell the difference between an expert premium market translator’s work and the work of an average bulk-market non-specialist at a glance.

It’s a Picasso vs. a 5th-generation photocopy of a grainy black-and-white mess.

Now, obviously, we all started out as novices producing those grainy photocopies and took a lifetime of work, study, collaboration and the development of subject-matter expertise to get into the Picasso range — it’s important to make this clear.

These “side-by-side” translations have been done going back about a decade. Some come from “mystery shopper” experiments, and others from translation workshops which most of us in the premium market have taught for at least a decade, so we actually SEE the huge discrepancies in quality right there in the room! This is not a mystery or unknown in the industry at large.

Even some raw GT finishes ahead of many translators who are still young, inexperienced, cannot write, or have no idea what they are translating.

Putting Your Translations “At Risk” For All Your Colleagues to See

Translators who engage in translation slams or other competitions where they take the same text and then publicly compare their translations, with hundreds of other translators witnessing that process, and a tough judge in the middle, discussing alternate translations, shades of meaning, the finer points of, say, legal and financial interpretation, etc. show the dramatic differences you see when translators confident in their work — and both highly specialized and also revised by colleagues on a regular basis — are willing to put their translations out there for all their colleagues to see.

For the most part, these competitions occur in the premium market at such events as the “Translate in the…” series, which deals with Fr<->Eng exclusively, and some competitions sponsored by the SFT in France, as well as most recently at the ITI Conference.

Here’s an ironclad rule: If your translations are not out there “at risk” for evaluation by your colleagues, you are not doing it right. You need hands-on, hard-skills collaborative workshops; translation slams; and shared portfolios of your work for everybody to see.

The way to break into these markets is not to just keep translating in isolation, without subject-matter training or collaboration, because the clients paying serious rates (above USD $0.50 per word) are deeply engaged in work in law and banking and industry and technology and are not usually out there in Translatorland talking to translators.

Bemoaning the Lack of Serious Translation Talent

I can’t tell you how many lawyers — just to pick one profession at random — I know who became translators because they were disgusted and fed up with the “quality” they were getting on a regular basis over years from a huge number of different translators who had translated one contract and then marketed themselves as a “legal translator.”

So the way to higher rates starts with subject-matter expertise. You have to know the finer points of the law to offer, say, five different translations of a phrase and explain to your client exactly how they are different in your source language and what you — the expert — think is important in their language (your target language).

That’s right — you get to explain the finer points of the law to a lawyer who is discussing a text in his own native language.

That’s the premium market.

If you are not able to do that — if you are not able to discuss the law in that detail with 5 different translation options, and a solid reason based on the subject-matter with a lawyer (or engineer, or banker, or physicist, or certified financial analyst) – then you are not there yet.

So your level of specialization should be on a level equivalent to a practitioner in that field.

That requires REAL expertise, not lightweight CPD, so expect to minor in these subjects in college, or go back for formal training. That means formal university training. Without this level of knowledge and expertise you will NOT see errors that you are making every day in your text that a true subject-expert will spot in an instant (several translators with readily recognizable names on social media recently published books containing howling scientific errors — and they had no clue. Don’t be them.) Skipping this step means you are not only delivering a substandard product to your client, your competition out there that does have expertise in the field will soon enough take your clients away from you.

There are many more steps on that ladder and most of them involve daily collaboration with other, more experienced colleagues.

I recognize that people must tire of hearing me say this, but there is NO OTHER WAY to make it to the pinnacle of the craft without leveraging the expertise of other smart, creative, thoughtful and engaged colleagues.

Find an expert reviser (or more) who reviews every word you translate. Establish revision partnerships with translators whose skill sets complement yours, but whose experience is superior to yours. Ideally they should come from an institutional framework, so if you translate physics into English, be revised by other physicist-translators with the American Institute of Physics who have greater expertise than you do. Have them share their marked-up copy with you on every assignment. There is no other way to avoid the “echo chamber” of translation that exists in your head, or to avoid making even glaring errors repeatedly, because nobody downstream has bothered to correct you.

Then you have to go out there and attend the same functions your clients do.

You also have to share your translations in public — perhaps do a slam or two as a form of practice — and see how you stack up against the 20 or 30 or 50 other translators who call themselves “experts.”

Some day — if you do this long enough — you will find your work has made incremental improvements over a very long time, and the distance between what you were producing five or ten years ago vs. what you are producing today will point you in the right direction for being successful in the premium market.

Other translators who have seen how good you are will begin to refer work to you that is too much for them to handle. Other translators working in the opposite direction will have also heard of you, and will be glad to have a trusted name to recommend to their clients for work in the opposite direction. Talent, experience, expertise and your final product drives rates. Not the other way around.

Rates: Welcome to the Premium Market

As you improve through specialization, collaboration and honed writing skills, raise your rates on a regular basis. Use earmuffs if you need them to combat howls of pain from low-ball clients. Use rates as a way to control workflow once it rises to the level where you are unable to service it all in a quality fashion.

If you make it into the premium market, be aware that $0.50 per word is a common rate, and project rates are becoming the predominant quoted practice.

Plus, the demand is intense, as there are simply not enough translators able to produce on this level. Translate a LOT. Every day. In the same way that professional athletes train hard every single day, your success in the market will be determined by your persistent dedication to translating regularly, being reviewed regularly, being revised/corrected regularly, raising your rates regularly, serving your clients exceptionally, and rising up the ladder in that fashion.

Final Thoughts

Finally, Smile. Laugh. Be nice. You are enormously fortunate to be succeeding in a field you love. How many people can say that about their work?

“His daughters anchored his life and gave him the freedom to live it. Without them, always at the center of his being, his life would have been little more than a vapor.” (Epitaph of actor James Rebhorn, 2014)

The person who knows me best – who knows everything about me – is my daughter.

She’s 15 years old.

She knows I will always tell her the truth, and won’t lie to her about anything.

And I don’t.

Like a good linguist, I tell her there are no bad words, only bad contexts. So she and her friends do a lot of swearing around me.

I’m a safe haven for them.

My nights are often interrupted by their group Skype calls where they are doing homework. They Skype me into their group chats to tell me funny stories or to share the latest school gossip.

Often as I drive them around late at night to drop them home after movies, they laugh and tease each about the crushes, the secrets, the currency of the earliest cusp of high school, without a care in the world that I can hear them.

Because we keep each others’ secrets.

A different galaxy altogether

I grew up in a world that must – honestly – have been in a different galaxy altogether. Children were to be seen, not heard, and even in families with close emotional ties, children were rarely, if ever, privy to the realities of the adult world. Lying to a child was not only considered normal, it was expected.

Psychological research has long documented that the strongest bonds of influence in families are mother-son, and father- daughter. What’s curious is how these have become distorted by the cultural lenses of our time.

Historians have long known that all US presidents were closest to their mothers – from the matriarchal Roosevelts to the imperious Rose Kennedy to Richard Nixon’s hanging on his mother’s every word, with Barbara Bush running the whole family.

Bill Clinton’s father died before he was even born. Barack Obama saw his father exactly once.

Despite this imbalance, boys still occupied a position of special privilege with both parents. Girls grew up mostly to be housewives, and the few occupational options available to girls even as late as the early 1980s – teacher and nurse, principally – were not prestigious or respected.

Television in the US duly portrayed a galaxy of leading boys and young men, as did popular music and every form of entertainment. It wasn’t until the 1990s that girls even began to be treated as sentient beings.

It turns out that this was the first trickle of a tidal wave of change.

The boys of my generation that grew up into men utterly revolted against the historical portrayal of girls as passive or weak, with painfully limited professional choices, or personal freedoms. It was our generation that was to reverse the opportunities available to girls, including options in education (especially the sciences), professions, freedoms and choices. This is a revolution in the making, to be sure, and hardly yet complete. And we are not fighting it totally alone. Yet it’s underway.

Cultural reflection

It’s especially poignant that this cultural revolution came to be expressed on TV and the movies by exploding onto the scene through the unending efforts of storytellers – the writers – who now control not only the story lines and characters, but every visual aspect of what appears on the air.

And something truly remarkable has shone through the work of this entire new generation of writers, mostly male, and mostly fathers, and mostly my age.

This generation of writers is placing daughters at the very centers of their characters’ lives, reversing a century of boy-centered cultural dominance.

This has created powerful tailwinds supporting the crucial notion that girls actually matter.

In The Godfather series of mobster crime movies, widely admired for its authenticity, girls were viewed with the scowling disapproval of PRC bureaucrats. They were ignored, brushed out of scenes, dragged away and ignored by their fathers.

In the modern mobster drama The Sopranos, widely cited as the most popular TV show in the modern era, Tony’s daughter Meadow occupies the center of his moral life. The son A.J., the presumed male heir to the business, is depicted as a washed-out failure, while Meadow is cast as the reason for his very existence.

This turnaround in mobster culture, of all possible worlds, had a huge impact. But it was the first wave of the new fathers choosing to portray daughters as central to their fathers’ lives, and as young adults with promising and responsible futures (Meadow eventually attends Columbia University, and proceeds with a legal career, while A.J. never attends college). And this made for poignant and compelling scenes.

In the later episode “Mayhem,” where Tony is in a coma, it’s Meadow’s voice, calling “daddy” as a young child, that brings him back to life.

And her voice only.

The same revolution was unfolding in the TV world of espionage and psychological thrillers.

Homeland is an especially intense, fast-paced drama featuring CIA case officers, assassins, a former Marine POW and enough story twists to confuse even the most patient viewer.

At the center of the first two seasons was the character Nicholas Brody, the former marine POW, who is suspected of having betrayed his country, does in fact betray his wife, lies to every adult in authority, including every CIA employee and official, cons and hides almost every aspect of his true life from everybody.

Except his from his daughter, Dana.

There is something about Brody at his very core that makes it impossible for him to lie to his daughter.

There is a dawning realization over the course of the show that Brody never lies to her, and she never lies to him. Their commitment to being honest with each other no matter what eventually becomes a thread that can help guide the viewer through the unfolding mayhem.

Meanwhile, the son is almost totally invisible in a drama about a US Marine Corp. officer.

In the closing arc of his story, when his CIA case officer (and lover) Carrie Matheson must bring him back to Washington after he has fled, she realizes nothing in his life – including her, or the CIA or even his allegiance to his country or the Marine Corps – has the same power over him as his daughter. In an especially emotionally wrenching scene, she tricks the daughter and father into meeting solely to use the daughter to do what she wants Brody to do.

And of course, Brody does exactly what she wants.

Bonding and Reflection

My daughter and I bonded first over homework and school projects – we’ve studied together nearly every day since she was in fourth grade – and later over movies, TV shows and musical theatre.

I introduced her to The Phantom of the Opera, which I first saw with the original cast at the Kennedy Center in the 1980s, and it’s inspired her to learn the entire repertoire of songs and commit herself to singing classical opera.

Today she’s under the training of a professional opera singer and she’s the top-rated first soprano in all high schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And she’s only a freshman.

This week she also won 1st prize in the Langley High School Science Fair in the biology category, based on a project she designed herself, competing against 150 sophomores, juniors and seniors. She advances to the regional competition in March.

Last Christmas she stayed up all night Christmas Eve to customize a gift card for me that listed all our favorite movies and quotes, even color coding the quotes by movie.

What she often asks me is whether I think she’s smart enough – if she has enough of me in her – to do whatever she wants – make it into Georgetown or Julliard. I always say she’s clearly more talented than I am in more ways than I can possibly count. She rolls her eyes and mumbles about IQ, and takes online IQ tests to see the results.

She wants to know more about my natural father – an underworld criminal genius whom I’ve never met and is almost certainly dead – because she knows she’s inherited parts of him.

But there is that doubt, as a child in an adult world, that she’s worried there’s something or somebody else around the corner that will surprise her, undo her, and derail her plans.

I worry less today than I used to about how much being a girl would hold her back. This new world where girls are becoming more empowered is encouraging, and desperately overdue, but we are not yet where we as a society need to be to assure they are treated with the same respect, challenged with the same expectations or driven by the same degree of encouragement that we give our boys.

Tess Whitty was kind enough to interview me on her “Marketing Tips for Translators” podcast this week on such topics as premium markets, best practices, subject-matter expertise, how translators’ use of dictionaries is evolving, how we might need to radically change the way we train the next generation of translators, upheavals in the translation industry and the future of the translation profession.

Bonus: My somewhat counterintuitive “tip” on how translators can best market themselves to direct clients and even the better boutique agencies.

I’ve had some solid positive feedback from colleagues on the interview, so I thought I’d use this blog post to both spread the word on the podcast and also to provide a platform for commentary and feedback should colleagues have observations, objections or additional insight, which is very common (and always welcome) on this blog.

A book on translation and translators that’s concise, brilliant, entertaining and ultimately indispensable.

It’s been five short years since its publication, but in this sparkling gem of a book, Chris Durban shatters the Poverty Cult thinking that still drives much of the labor pool that sustains the global translation services industry: the success-averse, hand-wringing, endlessly apologetic talent who have dutifully taken up their position as the trudging tortoise supporting three elephants, silently holding up the world, as in the Hindu creation myth.

A refreshing blast of fresh air – part wake-up call, part tough-love and part an earnest appeal to practicality – this book stands in stark contrast to the endless parade of post-recession books and Internet 10-step guides on how to become a madly successful freelance translator by standing downwind of a person speaking kitchen Spanish and absorbing all the expertise you’ll ever need by pure osmosis.

The book draws on a wealth of material at the core of the 14-year-old “Fire Ant and Worker Bee” advice column for translators and interpreters which itself grew out of relationships formed in the pre-Cambrian CompuServe Foreign Language Education Forum (FLEFO), an ancient watering hole for translators, some of whom would gather around the campfire to grumble about how mistreated and misunderstood they were in this vast, cruel, English-speaking, monolingual world.

It turns out that some of the non-grumblers were making a ton of money all along. This book represents the countervailing philosophy of those people – in this analogy, the masters of the Iron Age – who gave up on the fireside navel-gazing to seize their own destinies and reshape their world.

The format of the book is Q&A, the tone is frank, clever and often funny, but the message is utterly practical: You too can succeed as the author herself has, but the path is trickier and far more perilous than it at first seems.

The most hazardous tar trap for beginning translators turns out to be their own assumptions. The first chapter, wisely entitled: “Is This Option Really For Me? Straight Talk on Who Is Likely to Make It and Who Should Look Elsewhere,” contains detailed questions from people who are considering becoming professional translators themselves. But the questioners reveal an inordinate fascination with their own relative strengths and weaknesses in various languages, which is truly the wrong focus. While it’s admirable that these people are passionate about language and words (good!) it turns out that they are not very passionate about much else in the world.

This is what my daughter would call an Epic Fail.

The reason this fails is that translation is not about words. It’s about what the words are about.

It’s not just beginners who are ensnared by this idea. David Bellos wrote several thousand words on the topic of the elusiveness of meaning and uselessness of individual words in the otherwise fascinating and often insightful “Is that a Fish in Your Ear?”, yet never got even remotely close to capturing the same idea I did using the two short phrases above. (Disclaimer: those phrases represent the distillation of a lifetime translating and thinking about the nature of translation.)

It turns out that the most successful translators are at their core rabid philosophers of meaning. They mix and mingle and blend seamlessly into crowds of investment bankers and attorneys and physicists and engineers. And that’s because those translators speak the same meaning. This is the core of the dictum that all successful translators must have “subject-matter expertise,” an unhappily turgid and dense way of saying that you must know a lot about how the world works to people who can pay you to know these things. Budding translators seeking to work in today’s commercial translation market are best advised to attend law school or spend years in commodity trading pits or solder printed circuit boards or do any number of other dirt-under-the-fingernails jobs rather than obsess about memorizing pocket grammars.

This is also why professional translation is an excellent second career. And often a trying, difficult and sometimes futile first one.

The chapter headings in this book all pull double duty – they are instructive in their brevity – and posit both the question and answer in a Zen-koan-like way: “Pricing and Value,” “Specializing: Establishing Your Brand” and especially, “Marketing and Finding Clients: Regaining Control and Building a Strong Client Portfolio.”

The fact that the author must come right out and say “regaining control” in a chapter heading on how to find the right clients in today’s global commercial translation market – a multibillion dollar (that’s billion with a Carl Sagan plosive “b”) market by any reckoning – is instructive and illuminating. Translators’ market passivity, e.g. their startlingly near-universal willingness to take whatever fees are offered and to accept work from whatever clients are standing athwart the road they happen to be walking on, remains an endlessly persistent headwind that even this author must overcome to be heard.

It’s unclear why this is so. It’s been suggested (uncharitably) that translators are by their nature passive. After all, somebody else wrote the original text and created the original ideas. But such a statement is far more revealing about the painfully limited perspective of any person who would attempt to make such a claim. To cite just one example, in every meaningful way the Renaissance was above all else the work of translators, and the formative structures of the written form of the major European languages today were built foremost and principally on the labor, sweat and creative passions of translators. Often at the cost of their own lives.

It’s far more accurate to say that translators can do what authors do, but can do it in more than one language.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to insisting that translators and interpreters grab the reins and lead the charge on the commercial stage as the author of this fine work has done is that translators and interpreters are perfectly happy secretly standing to the side, defining, determining and in every way controlling the meaning of every multilingual conversation, statement, claim, patent, invention, ad, novel, poem, lawsuit, theory, proof, negotiation, settlement, movie and play that take place in any medium.

As one of the more visible proponents for moving upmarket into the premium translation market sector — a position I’ve argued since 1997, but one that is just now finding traction as we can reach increasingly larger populations of translators with the message — I think it’s crucial to discuss why premium-market translators have volunteered so much of their time, money and effort in recent years to share their experience and expertise with their colleagues on this topic.

The ultimate objective of this outreach, of course, is to point our colleagues to the greater opportunities, higher rates, more challenging work and often exceedingly high levels of client appreciation for what we do – all characteristics of the premium market – for those translators with the skill sets, inclination, dedication, personality and commitment to make such a move.

Market “research” vs. market realities

This is a more difficult challenge than one might imagine because the translation market is immense, opaque, highly fragmented and comprised of radically different dynamics.

Translation market “research,” meanwhile, has not come remotely close to portraying this complexity.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, despite their high price, such heavily-marketed “studies” distort reality by relying on self-reported data from bulk-market companies, missing many of the largest and most lucrative sectors of the market that for various reasons – national security, institutional confidentiality, competitive secrecy, and teaming agreements, to name a few – are compelled to fly under the “self-reporting” radar.

As a result, the enormously complex translation market has been massively distorted by this bulk-market “research” lens to portray nothing but bulk-market providers.

Cost to freelance translators

This distortion is detrimental to the best interests of freelance translators who have little to no visibility into the premium sector that offer premium-market translators — many of whom work for direct clients, bypassing the agencies altogether, a factor by itself that can result in dramatically higher incomes — much greater flexibility in clients, markets and even lifestyle choices.

When you earn much more, you have more options. I think most people would agree that with greater options, opportunities and choices comes greater power.

An additional stumbling block is that even in the bulk market, all visibility into clients, opportunities and rates is controlled by intermediaries — the bulk-market translation companies.

It’s true that such companies do employ very large numbers of translators, and that’s fair enough for translators who make the conscious choice to work in the bulk market. It’s advantageous when two parties can agree on the terms of their commercial relationship.

And for many translators the bulk-market is their market of choice, as it can be mutually beneficial – the “cut” taken by the agency is the price they willingly pay for the freedom to avoid direct engagement with clients, turn down work and take on a larger variety of assignments.

All of this makes perfect sense to those who have willingly chosen the bulk market.

Conflicting goals

But there is value, I think, in recognizing that despite some areas of mutual interest, these bulk-market behemoths and their smaller brethren have motivations and objectives that often conflict quite dramatically with the objectives of their freelance workforce.

For example, their business model mandates that they perpetually drive down the rates they pay these translators by setting them against each other to compete for the work that’s available from clients who belong to them, not to the translators.

This monopoly on the client relationship – the bulk-market agencies’ ability to control the entire client relationship, from terms, timelines and costs through rates and pricing – places a brutal ceiling on translator rates in a market full of translators perceived to all be equal and interchangeable.

Hence, rates have only one direction to go, and that’s down.

This reality has led to collapsing rates in the bulk market, a level that’s reached 35% in the last 4 years in many of the predominant language pairs.

It’s those specific pricing dynamics that are threatening the viability of the freelance business model today, even for many very experienced translators.

An extreme example of the downward spiral are those corporate announcements of rate cuts imposed across the board by major bulk-market companies that blame “market forces,” and “client pricing pressure,” that are followed months later by press releases citing multi-million-dollar bonuses awarded to the executives of these same companies for their success in “cutting costs.”

In this cynical downward pricing cram, there’s surely value in considering the opportunities awaiting translators in other market sectors where the demand for skilled translation talent and translation rates are both on the rise.

Premium Market Options

Direct ClientsEngaging clients directly — selling services directly to customers that pay you for the value you deliver to their operations as opposed to what an intermediary can negotiate you down to based on your competing as one individual in a sea of other translators, and then take a huge cut from all that — is, from an economic viewpoint alone, vastly more profitable, empowering and potentially rewarding.

Boutique AgenciesThe same could be said of working for industry-specialized boutique companies – some small, others quite large – whose value structures tend to more closely align with those of their translator workforce. These are the companies that pay you very well, provide team working environments, give feedback, assure prompt payment and offer opportunities for professional training and development.

In most cases, such boutique agencies have narrow specialties usually requiring laser-focused, long-term expertise from their freelancers in narrow sectors of finance, law, health care and select areas of industry and technology.

Talent Recruiting and Placement CompaniesAn additional option for premium market translators are talent placement and recruiting companies – often called “headhunters” – that recruit top talent, promote their specific skill set and then place them into high-paying, often permanent in-house positions. (Full disclosure: I am myself employed on a language contract with one such company.) This has long been the dominant placement mechanism in the high-priced IT industry and we are now seeing it expand to include premium-market translators.

The Risks of “More Premium Than Thou”

In a previous blog post, “It Was the Best of Times, it Was the Worst of Times: How the Premium Market Offers Translators Prosperity in an Era of Collapsing Bulk-Market Rates” (see “Popular Posts” panel to the right) I take great pains to emphasize that the translation market is a very long continuum consisting of billions of shades of gray. The “premium vs. bulk” dichotomy is a form of shorthand only.

We are all employed at various points on that continuum throughout our careers.

There is no one single differentiating line between the two markets, so to argue where one specific translator falls on the continuum vs. other translators – getting into a “more premium than thou” argument on social media, or worse, to belittle a translator who has been financially successful in the premium market on those same fora – is pointless, counterproductive, potentially dispiriting to colleagues who are working to help each other, and at the end of the day just sets us all up for unnecessary and personally divisive distractions.

Premium market psychology and skills

We’ve also worked hard over the years to emphasize the skills and focus needed to move upmarket. Specialty training and a focus on a narrow specialization is quite important – that means one or two specialties only – but essential to the enterprise is regular collaboration with colleagues and a lifetime commitment to improving your craft through such collaboration.

Revision, feedback and collaboration are all essential.

It turns out that my blog post that lays out this argument in detail happened to win the ProZ Community Choice Award for “Best Online Article” this year, which I thought was an especially kind and thoughtful recognition by my esteemed colleagues, although I think we all know it’s not really “the best online article.” 🙂 It’s entitled: “Three Lessons: Humility, Collaboration, Perseverance.” (See “Popular Posts” panel to the right).

Be Humble to the Potential of the Text

There’s a reason the first lesson is “humility.” None of us, no matter how skilled, experienced or talented, can possibly know even a fraction of what’s needed every day to master our subjects and elevate our craft on every single text that comes our way.

As one literary translator colleague has stated so eloquently, “Be humble to the potential of the text.”

On the subject of humility, I would also gently suggest that a closely related virtue is generosity.

Perhaps there’s value in considering the very substantial costs that people like Chris Durban, for example, incurs as she flies around the world at her own expense for the sole purpose of informing translators about her own premium markets, thereby turning them all into potential future competitors. I suppose there are some mental somersaults we could engage in that would lead us to conclusions other than the most obvious one, which is that she’s giving back to the profession that has been good to her.